There has lately been an increasing demand for houses or cabins built from logs, especially as vacation homes. In contrast to the conventional modular homes, which are built from prefabricated units, buildings of log-cabin style constructed from rough timbers must be assembled by hand and are therefore relatively costly to erect. When constructed from unseasoned wood, they tend to develop structural defects as the timbers shrink during drying and gaps are formed between them.
Various proposals already exist for the construction, from prefabricatd parts, of houses having the appearance of log cabins, with corner joints formed from stacked blocks whose log-shaped heads project beyond the outer surfaces of the adjoining walls. Such a construction is shown, for example, in German Pat. No. 186,837, with the boards of an outer wall section coming to rest against the rear faces of the block heads. According to Swiss Pat. No. 433,675 the blocks have rearward extensions to which the boards of the inner section of a double wall are secured. All these prior structures have imperfections from both a mechanical and an esthetic viewpoint.